Hurricane

Jack turned 18 months old yesterday.

 

The sleep regression continues and I’m about to jump off a cliff.  Joe will probably follow.  In our fatigue it is easy to believe Jack is doing this on purpose, torturing us by changing his sleep habits every day.  Some days he doesn’t nap at all.  Some nights he goes to bed at 11.  He was up until 1am some time last week, and awoke at 5:30am Saturday morning.  It’s random and heartbreaking.  I thought the newborn days were bad, but at least then we had a pattern!  Oh, and if you were wondering HOW he goes about getting to sleep, I couldn’t tell you.  Sometimes he nurses and falls asleep.  Sometimes he cries for daddy and wiggles to sleep next to him.  Last night he wouldn’t stop kicking (first me, then Joe) and we both got frustrated and decided Jack could run around for a while until our tempers cooled.  I took Jack back to bed at 11:30 and he went to sleep rather easily.  Then he was up twice during the night.

Eating patterns are just as erratic.  He eats pretty well overall and is willing to try just about anything but some days he only eats cheese and raisins.  The novelty of the fork has worn off.  We generally offer an array of foods and it’s always a surprise to see what he will eat.

Coloring is definitely a favorite past time.  You can tell because our apartment is now awash with “culley.”  He has gotten walls, cabinets, the dishwasher, his blocks, his drum, his books…you name it.  We are watching him but sometimes we have to go to the bathroom or make food or something and the crayons just seem to appear out of nowhere.  Most likely because he breaks them into smaller pieces and hides them in convenient locales to pull out when we least expect it.  It’s all part of the master plan, you see.

Joe has dubbed the boy “Hurricane Jack.”  Indeed, every day I come home from work and there is stuff EVERYWHERE.  First he goes for the book case and starts flinging books left and right.  Then he dumps his box of blocks.  Then he rips pages from the coloring books and scatters them.  Then he goes into the pantry and starts removing cans of tomato paste.  And when there is no more mess to make and he has worn himself out, he runs around FASTER and even starts spinning to keep himself from falling asleep.  Having a toddler is like watching someone on speed!

I am thankful that we share a lot of special moments in addition to all of the crazy times.  Jack is noticing so much more of the world around him, discovering that everything has a name.  Watching him discover new concepts is pretty amazing and it’s giving me a new appreciation for the complexities of life.  It’s only recently that I realized how abstract the ideas of colors and numbers are and as Jack pretends to count along with me or identify an object with a color (yellow is his favorite) I can’t help but wonder how he will ever understand, and how any of us ever understood that ‘one’ means a single object or that yellow is a particular pigment.  It’s mindboggling and wonderful and gives me just a tiny bit of understanding as to why Jack doesn’t want to sleep.